In New York's Smaller Schools, 'Good Year and a Tough Year'

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: August 8, 2005

The memoirs, written by ninth graders, were as flawed as they were vivid: riddled with ungrammatical sentences, spelling errors and absurd punctuation. As they read their work to an audience of parents, several of the young authors stumbled over their own words.

But for Kelly Connerton, the sole English teacher at Peace and Diversity Academy, the end-of-year essays -- including stories about a dying uncle's last days, a family's flight from war-torn Macedonia, a boy's remorse over joining a gang -- were a triumph. ''I have kids who were not writing a thing,'' she said. ''They are now writing two-page essays.''

Peace and Diversity, in the Bronx, is one of 53 small high schools that opened last September as part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to remake public education in New York. And in a way, the students' essays are a metaphor for the inaugural year of the small schools: far from perfect, but with notable achievement and a lot of hard work still ahead.

New York City's experience is being watched by districts nationwide that are following its lead in creating small schools as an antidote to alarming high school dropout rates.

The hope is that schools with fewer than 500 students will create a more intimate learning environment, improving attendance and achievement by making it easier to identify students' needs. Themes like peace and diversity are used to make school more engaging, even as the curriculums focus on basic requirements, not vocational training or electives.

More than a month after the school year ended, there are few hard statistics on the new small schools. Attendance figures have yet to be audited, promotion rates yet to be finalized, results of Regents exams yet to be published by the state.

But anecdotal evidence suggests better numbers than at the large, failing schools that small schools are replacing -- admittedly not a high bar to clear, since the four-year graduation rate at those schools was 35 percent.

In dozens of interviews, principals, parents, students, teachers and city education officials were unanimous on a crucial point: The 5,000 or so ninth graders in the small schools were better off than they would have been in big schools.

''In the beginning I wasn't too happy because they were so unorganized,'' said Marlene McLeod, whose son, Justin, attends Peace and Diversity. But she said she had quickly learned that the principal, Andrew M.L. Turay, was running a different type of public school, and she decided to become active in the PTA for the first time in years.

''I feel so good because he knows me by name; he knows my child,'' she said. ''You just get the feeling everybody cares. It got me involved.'' At Justin's old school, Middle School 142, she said: ''I didn't even bother. You couldn't even get through to the school; the phone just rang.''

Yet across the city, the small schools labored against innumerable obstacles. Chief among them were location and facilities problems, staff turnover, and students' extremely low academic skills, which hit some schools particularly hard. Nearly 70 percent of the students started the year performing below grade level, often far below, in math and reading.

The small schools -- with themes like the law, performing arts, technology, and architecture -- also strained to carve out identities in the face of large numbers of ambivalent students. More than half of pupils in the small schools had applied elsewhere and were rejected, or had applied nowhere and were simply assigned to a small school.

In interviews and in visits to small schools, it was clear that the schools had built closer relationships between teachers and students than traditional large schools. But it was also clear that teachers in these schools were being called on to perform roles for which they were not trained: counselor, social worker, foster parent. Many spoke of feeling professionally and emotionally exhausted.

''It was a good year and a tough year,'' said Johane Ligond?an English teacher at the F.D.N.Y. High School for Fire and Life Safety, a new small school in Brooklyn. ''It was a very tough year for both teachers and students. But because we love them, I think that makes a big difference. When we push them, they know it's out of love.''

City education officials said they were pleased with the results this year, but conceded the challenges. ''The work is extremely hard,'' said Garth Harries, the chief executive of the office of new schools. ''And the progress is incremental.''

New York City spent about $29 million to start the new schools in 2004-5, and will spend $31 million to open 52 more small schools this coming year. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $100 million to create the schools. All the small schools must have a community or cultural organization as a partner, a requirement intended to bring in additional money and resources as well as to give the private sector a stake in the schools' success.

The year brought into high relief questions that have dogged previous efforts to create small schools: